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Removing AlertBot Traffic from Website Log Reports

Since AlertBot hits your website in the same way a regular user does, AlertBot monitoring will register as regular hits in your traffic reports. This poses an issue when attempting to accurately measure and report your website's traffic for real users.

Some log-based website traffic reporting programs allow you to exclude log rows based on IP, Host, or Browser's User Agent. Using this feature, you can remove the effects of AlertBot monitoring from your log reports. While AlertBot's IP and Host vary from Test Station to Test Station, the Browser's User Agent remains constant. This makes it an ideal candidate for use in filtering your website log reports. While it is possible to filter your log reports with the IP address, we would not recommend it since Test Station IPs may change over time.

The default User Agent used by AlertBot's Availability and Protocol monitors is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.0; AlertBot)" however; this is a configurable value you can change in your monitor's Test Scenario. Please see the "Browser Agent" setting in your monitor's Test Scenario for the User Agent being used by your monitor.

As you can see, the default User Agent has the word "AlertBot" at the end. This makes it uniquely different than any other User Agent hitting your website. By excluding this unique User Agent from your website log reports, you will effectively exclude all the AlertBot monitoring traffic from your reports.

The browser agent AlertBot uses for TrueBrowser monitors is true to the browser that is selected in the "Web Browser" field. As such, "AlertBot" is not added into the browser's user agent.

Updated on: 10/24/2022

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